The Book of Illusions

  These Memoirs have been composed at different times and in different countries. For that reason, it has been necessary for me to add prologues that describe the places which were before my eyes and the feelings which were in my heart when the thread of my narrative was resumed. The changing forms of my life are thus intermingled with one another. It has sometimes happened to me in my moments of prosperity to have to speak of my days of hardship; and in my times of tribulation to retrace the periods of my happiness. My youth entering into my old age, the gravity of my later years tingeing and saddening the years of my innocence, the rays of my sun crossing and blending together from the moment of its rising to the moment of its setting, have produced in my stories a kind of confusion—or, if you will, a kind of mysterious unity. My cradle recalls something of my tomb, my tomb something of my cradle; my sufferings become pleasures, my pleasures sufferings; and, now that I have completed the perusal of these Memoirs, I am no longer certain if they are the product of a youthful mind or a head gray with age.

  I cannot know if this mixture will be pleasing or displeasing to the reader. There is nothing I can do to remedy it. It is the result of my changing fortunes, the inconsistency of my lot. Its storms have often left me with no table to write on but the rock on which I have been shipwrecked.

  I have been urged to allow some portions of these Memoirs to appear in my lifetime, but I prefer to speak from the depths of my tomb. My narrative will thus be accompanied by those voices which have something sacred about them because they come from the sepulchre. If I have suffered enough in this world to be turned into a happy shadow in the next, a ray from the Elysian Fields will throw a protective light on these last pictures of mine. Life sits heavily on me; perhaps death will suit me better.

  These Memoirs have held a special importance for me. Saint Bonaventure was granted permission to go on writing his book after he was dead. I cannot hope for such a favor, but if nothing else I should like to be resurrected at some midnight hour in order to correct the proofs of mine ….

  If any part of my labors has been more satisfying to me than the others, it is that which relates to my youth—the most hidden corner of my life. In it I have had to reawaken a world known only to myself, and as I wandered around in that vanished realm, I have encountered only silence and memories. Of all the people I have known, how many are still alive today?

  … If I should die outside of France, I request that my body not be brought back to my native country until fifty years have elapsed since its first inhumation. Let my remains be spared a sacrilegious autopsy; let no one search my lifeless brain and extinguished heart to discover the mystery of my being. Death does not reveal the secrets of life. The idea of a corpse traveling by post fills me with horror, but dry and moldering bones are easily transported. They will be less weary on that final voyage than when I dragged them around this earth, burdened down by the weight of my troubles.

  I started working on those pages the morning after my conversation with Alex. I could do that because I owned a copy of the book (the two-volume Pléiade edition compiled by Levaillant and Moulinier, complete with variants, notes, and appendices) and had held it in my hands just three days before Alex’s letter arrived. Earlier that week, I had finished installing my new bookcases. For several hours every day, I had been unpacking books and putting them on the shelves, and somewhere in the midst of that tedious operation, I had stumbled across the Chateaubriand. I hadn’t looked at the Memoirs in years, but that morning, in the chaos of my Vermont living room, surrounded by empty, overturned boxes and towers of unclassified books, I had impulsively opened them again. The first thing my eyes had fallen upon was a short passage in volume one. In it, Chateaubriand tells of accompanying a Breton poet on an outing to Versailles in June of 1789. It was less than a month before the taking of the Bastille, and halfway through their visit they spotted Marie Antoinette walking by with her two children. Casting a smiling look in my direction, she gave me the same gracious salute that I had received from her on the day of my presentation. I shall never forget that look of hers, which was soon to be no more. When Marie-Antoinette smiled, the shape of her mouth was so clear that (horrible thought!) the memory of that smile enabled me to recognize the jaw of this daughter of kings when the head of the unfortunate woman was discovered in the exhumations of 1815.

  It was a fierce, breathtaking image, and I kept thinking about it long after I had closed the book and put it on the shelf. Marie-Antoinette’s severed head, unearthed from a pit of human remains. In three short sentences, Chateaubriand travels twenty-six years. He goes from flesh to bone, from piquant life to anonymous death, and in the chasm between them lies the experience of an entire generation, the unspoken years of terror, brutality, and madness. I was stunned by the passage, moved by it in a way that no words had moved me in a year and a half. Then, just three days after my accidental encounter with those sentences, I received Alex’s letter asking me to translate the book. Was it a coincidence? Of course it was, but at the time I felt as though I had willed it to happen—as though Alex’s letter had somehow completed a thought I was unable to finish myself. In the past, I had never been one to believe in mystical claptrap of that sort. But when you live as I was living then, all shut up inside yourself and not bothering to look at anything around you, your perspective begins to change. For the fact was that Alex’s letter was dated Monday the ninth, and I had received it on Thursday the twelfth, three days later. Which meant that when he was in New York writing to me about the book, I had been in Vermont holding the book in my hands. I don’t want to insist on the importance of the connection, but I couldn’t help reading it as a sign. It was as if I had asked for something without knowing it, and then suddenly my wish had been granted.

  So I settled down and began working again. I forgot about Hector Mann and thought only about Chateaubriand, burying myself in the massive chronicle of a life that had nothing to do with my life. That was what appealed to me most about the job: the distance, the sheer distance between myself and what I was doing. It had been good to camp out for a year in 1920s America; it was even better to spend my days in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century France. The snow fell on my little mountain in Vermont, but I scarcely paid any attention. I was in Saint-Malo and Paris, in Ohio and Florida, in England, Rome, and Berlin. Much of the work was mechanical, and because I was the servant of the text and not its creator, it demanded a different kind of energy from the one I had put into writing The Silent World. Translation is a bit like shoveling coal. You scoop it up and toss it into the furnace. Each lump is a word, and each shovelful is another sentence, and if your back is strong enough and you have the stamina to keep at it for eight or ten hours at a stretch, you can keep the fire hot. With close to a million words in front of me, I was prepared to work as long and as hard as necessary, even if it meant burning down the house.

  For most of that first winter, I didn’t go anywhere. Once every ten days, I would drive to the Grand Union in Brattleboro to shop for food, but that was the only thing I allowed to interrupt my routine. Brattleboro was a good distance out of my way, but by driving those extra twenty miles I figured I could avoid running into anyone I knew. The Hampton crowd tended to shop at another Grand Union just north of the college, and the chances of any of them turning up in Brattleboro were slim. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen, and in spite of my cautious planning, the strategy eventually backfired on me. One afternoon in March, as I was loading up my cart with toilet paper in aisle six, I found myself cornered by Greg and Mary Tellefson. This led to an invitation to dinner, and even though I did my best to worm out of it, Mary kept juggling the dates until I had run out of imaginary excuses. Twelve nights later, I drove to their house at the edge of the Hampton campus, less than a mile from where I had lived with Helen and the boys. If it had just been the two of them, it might not have been such an ordeal for me, but Greg and Mary had taken it upon themselves to invite twenty other people, and I wasn’t prepared for such a
crowd. They were all friendly, of course, and most of them were probably glad to see me, but I felt awkward, out of my element, and every time I opened my mouth to say something, I found myself saying the wrong thing. I wasn’t up on the Hampton gossip anymore. They all assumed that I would want to hear about the latest intrigues and embarrassments, the divorces and extramarital affairs, the promotions and departmental quarrels, but the truth was that I found it unbearably dull. I would drift away from the conversation, and a moment later I would find myself surrounded by another group of people engaged in a different but similar conversation. No one was tactless enough to mention Helen (academics are too polite for that), and therefore they stuck to supposedly neutral subjects: recent news items, politics, sports. I had no idea what they were talking about. I hadn’t looked at a paper in over a year, and as far as I was concerned, they could have been referring to events that had taken place in another world.

  The party began with everyone milling around on the ground floor, wandering in and out of rooms, clustering together for a few minutes and then breaking apart to form new clusters in other rooms. I went from the living room to the dining room to the kitchen to the den, and at some point Greg caught up with me and put a scotch and soda in my hand. I took it without thinking, and because I was anxious and ill at ease, I drank it down in about twenty-four seconds. It was the first drop of alcohol I had had in more than a year. I had succumbed to the temptations of various hotel minibars while doing my research on Hector Mann, but I had sworn off liquor after I’d moved to Brooklyn and started writing the book. I didn’t particularly crave the stuff when it wasn’t around, but I knew that I was only a few weak moments away from creating a bad problem for myself. My behavior after the plane crash had convinced me of that, and if I hadn’t picked myself up and left Vermont when I did, I probably wouldn’t have lived long enough to be attending Greg and Mary’s party—not to speak of being in a position to wonder why the hell I had come back.

  After I finished the drink, I went to the bar for a refill, but this time I dispensed with the soda and added only ice to the glass. For the third one, I forgot about the ice and poured it straight.

  When dinner was ready, the guests lined up around the dinner table, filled their plates with food, and then scattered into other parts of the house to look for chairs. I wound up on the sofa in the den, wedged between the armrest and Karin Müller, an assistant professor in the German department. My coordination was already a bit wobbly by then, and as I sat there with a plateful of salad and beef stew balanced precariously on my knee, I turned to retrieve my drink from the back of the sofa (where I had placed it before sitting down), and no sooner did I take hold of the glass than it slipped out of my hand. A quadruple shot of Johnnie Walker splashed against Karin’s neck, and then, an instant later, the glass clunked against her spine. She jumped—how could she not jump?—and when she did, she knocked over her own plate of stew and salad, which not only sent my plate crashing to the floor, but landed upside down on my lap.

  It was hardly a major catastrophe, but I had drunk too much to know that, and with my pants suddenly drenched in olive oil and my shirt splattered with gravy, I chose to take offense. I don’t remember what I said, but it was something cruel and insulting, an utterly uncalled-for remark. Clumsy cow. I think that was it. But it also might have been stupid cow, or else stupid, clumsy cow. Whatever the words were, they expressed an anger that must never be articulated under any circumstances, least of all when they can be overheard by a roomful of edgy, high-strung college professors. There is probably no need to add that Karin was neither stupid nor clumsy; and far from resembling a cow, she was an attractive, slender woman in her late thirties who taught courses on Goethe and Hölderlin and had never shown anything but the greatest respect and kindness toward me. Just seconds before the accident, she had invited me to give a talk to one of her classes, and I was clearing my throat and getting ready to tell her that I would have to think it over when the drink spilled. It was entirely my fault, and yet I immediately turned around and put the blame on her. It was a disgusting outburst, yet one more proof that I wasn’t fit to be let out of my cage. Karin had made a friendly overture to me, had in fact been giving off tentative, ever so subtle signs that she was available for more intimate conversations on any number of subjects, and I, who had not touched a woman in almost two years, found myself responding to those nearly imperceptible hints and imagining, in the crude and vulgar way of a man with too much alcohol in his blood, what she would look like without any clothes on. Was that why I snapped at her so viciously? Was my self-loathing so great that I had to punish her for awakening a glimmer of sexual arousal in me? Or did I secretly know that she was doing nothing of the kind and that the whole little drama was my own invention, a moment of lust brought on by the nearness of her warm, perfumed body?

  To make matters worse, I wasn’t the least bit sorry when she started to cry. We were both standing by then, and when I saw Karin’s lower lip begin to tremble and the corners of her eyes fill with tears, I was glad, almost jubilant over the consternation I had caused. There were six or seven other people in the room just then, and they had all turned in our direction after Karin’s first yelp of surprise. The noise of clattering plates had brought several more guests to the threshold, and when I came out with my obnoxious remark, there were at least a dozen witnesses who heard it. Everything went silent after that. It was a moment of collective shock, and for the next couple of seconds no one knew what to say or do. In that small interval of breathlessness and uncertainty, Karin’s hurt turned to anger.

  You have no right to talk to me like that, David, she said. Who do you think you are?

  Fortunately, Mary was one of the people who had come to the doorway, and before I could do any further damage, she rushed into the room and took hold of my arm.

  David didn’t mean it, she said to Karin. Did you, David? It was just one of those things that come flying out on the spur of the moment.

  I wanted to say something harsh and contradictory, something that would prove I’d meant every word I’d said, but I held my tongue. It took all my powers of self-control to do that, but Mary had gone out of her way to act as peacemaker, and a part of me knew that I would regret causing her any more trouble. Even so, I didn’t apologize, and I didn’t try to make nice. Rather than say the thing I wanted to say, I freed my arm from her grasp and left the room, walking out of the den and across the living room as my former colleagues looked on and said nothing.

  I went straight upstairs to Greg and Mary’s bedroom. My plan was to grab my things and leave, but my parka was buried under a massive pile of coats on the bed, and I couldn’t find it. After digging around for a little while, I started tossing the coats onto the floor, eliminating possibilities in order to simplify my search. Just when I had come to the halfway point—more coats off the bed than on—Mary walked into the room. She was a short, round-faced woman with blond frizzy hair and reddish cheeks, and as she stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, I immediately understood that she’d had it with me. I felt like a child about to be scolded by his mother.

  What are you doing? she said.

  Looking for my coat.

  It’s in the downstairs closet. Don’t you remember?

  I thought it was here.

  It’s downstairs. Greg put it in the closet when you came. You were the one who found the hanger for him.

  All right, I’ll look for it downstairs.

  But Mary wasn’t about to let me off so easily. She took a few more steps into the room, bent down for a coat, and flung it angrily onto the bed. Then she picked up another coat and threw that one onto the bed as well. She went on collecting coats, and each time she thwacked another one down on the bed, she interrupted what she was saying in mid-sentence. The coats were like punctuation marks—sudden dashes, hasty ellipses, violent exclamation points—and each one broke through her words like an axe.

  When you go downstairs, she said, I want y
ou to … make up with Karin … I don’t care if you have to get down on your knees … and beg for her forgiveness … Everyone’s talking about it … and if you don’t do this for me now, David … I’m never going to invite you to this house again.

  I didn’t want to come in the first place, I answered. If you hadn’t twisted my arm, I never would have been here to insult your guests. You could have had the same dull and insipid party you always have.

  You need help, David … I’m not forgetting what you’ve been through … but patience lasts just so long … Go and see a doctor before you ruin your life.

  I live the life that’s possible for me. It doesn’t include going to parties at your house.

  Mary threw the last coat onto the bed, and then, for no discernible reason, she abruptly sat down and began to cry.

  Listen, fuckhead, she said in a quiet voice. I loved her, too. You might have been married to her, but Helen was my best friend.

  No she wasn’t. She was my best friend. And I was hers. This has nothing to do with you, Mary.

  That put an end to the conversation. I had been so hard on her, so absolute in my rejection of her feelings that she couldn’t think of anything more to say. When I left the room, she was sitting with her back to me, shaking her head back and forth and looking down at the coats.

  Two days after the party, word came from the University of Pennsylvania Press that they wanted to publish my book. I was almost a hundred pages into the Chateaubriand translation at that point, and when The Silent World of Hector Mann was released a year later, I had another twelve hundred pages behind me. If I kept working at that pace, I would have a completed draft in seven or eight more months. Add on some extra time for revisions and changes of heart, and in less than a year I would be delivering a finished manuscript to Alex.